The Easy Chair: Talks & Round Table Discussions

Episode 12

Bankruptcy; Tax Revolt; Burton of Brittany

Transcript:

RJ Rushdoony: This is RJ Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 12, February the 15th, 1982. I want to thank those of you who have written to me and made suggestions about subjects to cover. One of you sent in a clipping about the bankruptcies in the United States. And I’d like to comment very briefly on that. The article states and I quote, “The vast number of personal bankruptcy cases filed these days is a national disgrace. In the first nine months of 1981, there were 339,395 personal bankruptcy actions filed nationwide. It’s getting so filing for bankruptcy, is about as common as filing for divorce and carries about the same stigma. Much of the increase can be attributed to double digit inflation, credit card abuse, unemployment and other problems brought on by recession. But primary blame can be laid to the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, which makes it comparatively easy for individuals to escape responsibility for their debts.”

Now there’s no question that both personal and corporate bankruptcies are increasing at a phenomenal rate. There have been several excellent articles lately including this one, about these bankruptcies but all these articles overlook one critical fact. Partly because the press by and large comments on the obvious. When a man files for bankruptcy, he not only represents a personal failure but he takes others in his wake. For example, supposing a man has a legitimate debt which he recently contracted with someone for about 100,000 and I’m thinking of an actual case. He files for bankruptcy. Now the person to whom that money is owed is very often a person who very much needs that money.

And suddenly the monthly payments are no longer forthcoming. Because the bankruptcy courts are so clogged, it seems to take forever almost a lifetime before that problem is unrivaled. As a result, what happens in the wake of a bankruptcy is often far more revealing as to the consequences for the economy than the personal bankruptcy or the corporate bankruptcy. Because the bankruptcy in this case according to the article, in the first nine months of 1981, 339,395 personal bankruptcies.

Those personal bankruptcies must have affected two or three million people, easily. People to whom money was owed. In some instances, those debts were contracted not too long before bankruptcy was filed. Now, that’s a consequence of bankruptcy that we do not hear about in the press and it’s perhaps the most important consequence. Now to an entirely different matter, years ago when I was much younger, I dutifully read and I still have the book on my shelf, Einstein’s original book on the theory of relativity. Don’t ask me what he said because the book was pretty well over my head.

However, I recently in fact this noon when I was doing some browsing after lunch, encountered a definition of relativity given by Einstein himself, and here it’s all clear. So don’t ever complain that you have any trouble understanding relativity because we have it here from Einstein himself and I quote. “When a man sits for an hour with a pretty girl on his knee, it seems like a minute, but let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than an hour, that’s relativity.” That now makes you a scientific servant because you understand Einstein’s explanation.

I’d like to with Einstein give you his account of how things are sometimes misunderstood by definition. He said and I quote, “I was once walking in the country on a hot day with a blind friend and remarked that I would like a cold drink of milk. I understand drink, said my friend but what is milk? A white liquid I replied. I know liquid but what is white? The same color as the Swans feathers. I know feathers but what is a swan? A bird with a crooked neck. I know neck but what is crooked? I lost by Patience, I seized his arm and straightened it, then I bent it at the elbow and said that is crooked. Said my blind companion. Now I know what you mean by milk.”

Einstein obviously had a sense of humor. Before we go on a little more on a life vein, from John Quincy Adams, one of our very interesting early presidents. And in his memoirs, he wrote this note in kind of a diary. “Philadelphia October 12th, 1818, we dined and spent the evening at Mr. W Jones, the president of the bank of the United States. I was not satisfied with myself this day having talked too much at dinner I never take a large share in conversation without saying things which I afterwards wish were unsaid. Yet in the estimation of others, I have pass off on the whole better when I talk freely than when silent and reserved.

This stimulates me to talk more than is wise or proper and to give to the conversation of mixed companies, a tone of discussion which becomes irksome and tedious. Nor can I always, I did not this day altogether of avoid a dogmatical and peremptory tone and manner. Always disgusting and especially offensive in persons to whose age or situation, others consider some deference do.”

Well, there are a few of us I trust to have not felt like John Quincy Adams at one time or another. Something else I liked as I was reading John Quincy Adams was his address of July 4th 1821. It is a very critical comment on the British Empire. He compares Britain and its imperialism to the United States and he concludes by saying and I quote, “America’s glory is not dominion but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield but the motto upon her shield is freedom, independence, peace, this has been her declaration. This has been as far as her necessary intercourse with the rust of mankind would permit her practice.”

God grant that it may again be the case and that our practice and our life may be one of a dedication to Liberty. Now to a more serious subject dealing just very briefly with a recently published book Irwin Schiff; How anyone can stop paying income taxes written with Howy Murzin. Before you decide that I have joined the tax revolt, let me say I don’t agree with shit. This was published by Freedom Books in Hamden, Connecticut in 1982. And Freedom Books located at P.O. Box 5303 Hamden, Connecticut 06518 in case you’re interested. The book is priced at 10.95.

However I definitely am against the tax revolt which Schiff is a major champion of. Schiff is a very intelligent and a superior man. He wrote an excellent book a few years ago entitled The Biggest Con; how the government is policing you. And I’m dealing with it because I regard Schiff as a man to take very seriously. He’s a fighter, he is not afraid to put his life and his future on the line in terms of what he believes. In this book, what he tries to do and I think makes a fairly good case is to show how we can legally stop paying income taxes. By legally he means, according to law. In terms of acts of Congress, court’s decisions, IRS regulations and so on, and his thesis is that the income tax is voluntary in nature.

To be otherwise, it would violate the constitutional prohibition of slavery or involuntary servitude which is what is compelled of us when we are compelled to keep records for the federal government withholding taxes, do the accounting and so on. Now very clearly, Schiff lines up some persuasive legal decisions and the like and has some legal victories to show for his thesis. But I think there’s a serious fallacy in the entire tax revolt movement. First, let me call attention to something I wrote in one of the early journals of Christian Reconstruction which is still in print and available. It was on Jesus and the tax revolt.

And I went there into the fact that Jesus had to deal with the tax revolt in Judea. The people of the day were against paying taxes to a very unpopular authority of the Roman government. And so Jesus had to deal with the tax revolt issue and did very tellingly. He was against it.

Now,  the second point I’d like to make with regard to Schiff’s argument is that he is relying on the law, on court decisions, on IRS regulations and the like and there is nothing more dangerous to rely on, than the law because the constitution today does not mean very much. It is a pretext, a pretext used by the cons in a variety of ways to accomplish what they want to accomplish in the way of social legislation. A very interesting book just being published now by Oxford University Press in New York. Their mail order address is 16_00 Pollitt Drive Fairlawn, New Jersey 07410.

The book will not officially be published until April and it will then be published for $15.95. But the book is very important, the title by the way The Brandeis-Frankfurter Connection; The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices. The author is Bruce Allen Murphy, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Murphy in 1976 discovered 300 never before published letters from Brandeis to Frankfurter. These letters were written when Frankfurter was still a professor of law at Harvard and they reveal a very, very interesting kind of operation by the Supreme Court, to quote.

“From the second hundred days of the new deal on nearly every major piece of legislation proposed by Roosevelt, was conceived or influenced or sabotaged by Brandeis. Lobbied for by Frankfurter, drafted by their allies including the most important legal drafting team in American history, Thomas Corcoran and Ben Cohen.” Now, many Supreme Court decisions were written by this means. And let me quote, “Inside information on Supreme Court activities provided by Brandeis served as the basis for much research conducted by Frankfurter’s best Harvard students which would then appear in the Harvard Law Review and be cited by Brandeis in his decisions, used to lobby his colleagues on the court and to instigate judicial reform in the legislature.”

Well, so much for the integrity of the law. The law was manufactured, a popular sentiment created or a legal supposedly legal data manufactured by the research factory at Harvard Law School. And they signed orders secretly from Brandeis to Frankfurter with Corcoran and others in on this entire business of manufacturing new laws with supposedly solid legal foundations. Now, given the nature of American law today, we can hardly depend on the law. A lawyer must do so, he has to go into court today with massive legal support from the mouths of the judges themselves in order to hold the line on what the law currently says, and even then, he cannot be sure of the decision.

So under the circumstances to be constitutional fundamentalists as men like Schiff are in the tax revolt people are saying this is what the Constitution says and this is what the court says. As though they’re bound by it, is ridiculous. I can’t see it at all. Now, hopefully someday we may take a more responsible … Add a two torts law in our courts and the public at large, but until then, it’s very unwise to depend on the law. There are many interesting little tidbits in Schiff’s book. This little item tickled me. He said, “That for the last four years he has made his checks out using a non-reproducible pen. A tag used by artists making advertising layouts. And this specialty ink usually cannot be picked up by photocopiers bank microfilm equipment.

So if you use these pens and the IRS gains access to your bank records, apart from your bank statement, they’ll only get blank checks to look at. While you of course will still have legible origins or originals should you need them. This non-reproducible ink is a peacock blue and I recommend that it be used on blue green checks.” You’re not going to change the country with the appearing ink or anything like that, it’s going to take a change in the hearts of the people. I have a high respect for Irwin Schiff. I think he’s a very brilliant and talented man. I wish he could see that the issues are far deeper than what he thinks they are.

I do agree with him that the 16th Amendment and the income tax constitute a major evil but the real evil lies deeper, it is envy in the hearts of men. Envy which led men to say we’re going to soak the rich. And whenever you try to do something to others, ultimately in God’s universe it comes back at you. And the so today, the people who have envy created that are now being hard hit. However, one interesting fact in Schiff’s book and there are a number of very interesting points but this I think is one that we tend to forget. We look back on history and see only the lack of technology comparably in times passed, and therefore, feel that everything that then existed was just horrible.

Now serfdom was a very real and in some respects an ugly fact. However we must not overrate it. It also meant protection from service for the service, the peasantry. It had its pros and its cons and that’s why it lasted so long. Actually the worst era of serfdom was in the late Middle Ages to the 19th century. In other words when there came a decline in the life of the church in the later Middle Ages, there was also a decline in the life of the people. And serfdom became much more ugly as a result. And slavery and serfdom and there is a difference between the two but they are related, began to flourish in Western civilization. As a matter of fact serfdom only came into Russia about the same time, in the modern era. Old Russia had its problems with the Mongols and other things but they did not have serfdom.

The peasantry owned their own lands and were free. Moreover when we talk about slavery today, we think about the Negroes which is not justifiable. In many respects black slavery in the United States was not as difficult a lot of serfdom was in Europe at the comparable time. And by the way, slavery persisted in some parts of Europe almost to the same time into the early 1800s, there was still slavery in Tuscany. On top of that, a lot of many of the serfs in Europe was far, far more degrading and evil than that of the Negro slaves in this country. So bad as slavery was and unbiblical as it was, we must recognize that when we look at our past as though we were singularly evil among the nations, we are distorting history seriously.

The fact of serfdom in some portions of Europe was so bad that vast numbers of children were abandoned by parents who had no will to live, had no desire to have their children live. They were left at foundling homes where they died for the most part. That was an era of a horrible hopelessness. Well Schiff makes an interesting point, he says, “If the serfs during the Middle Age is turned over 25% of their productivity to their lords, what does that make current Americans who now pay better than 40% of their productivity to their lord, government? Is America truly the land of the free and the home of the brave or has it become rather the land of the indentured and the home of the meek? Taxation is one thing, but what we now have in America is the illegal confiscation of wealth in the guise of lawful taxation.”

And at that point he’s thoroughly valid, it’s an excellent point. It’s easy to look back and say that because the serfs didn’t have the technology we have, therefore their lot was a horrible one. But they paid a lesser portion of their income to their lords than we now pay to civil government. So we can hardly call ourselves free than the serfs unfree. As a matter of fact, what we need to recognize is that slavery is today more prevalent than it ever was before in history. All you have to do is to look at the Iron Curtain Countries, the slave, labor camps and the like.

Moreover, what we need to recognize is that as the courts have interpreted it, the constitution and its prohibition by amendment of slavery only for a bad, private slavery. The private ownership of slaves. Throughout history, a very high percentage of slavery has been the state ownership of people, and that has consistently been the worst. When there have been private owners, they have been sometimes very evil and sometimes, from antiquity to the present, they have regarded the slaves as lesser members of the family and been often very gracious to them, very courteous, very thoughtful. So it has been both beneficent at times and evil at other times.

But whenever you have had the state ownership of people, state operated slavery it has been inhuman, impersonal and consistently evil. Now, today, this is the most prevalent thing in the world. In much of the world living under Marxist tyranny, the people are slaves. Increasingly in the so-called democracies, people are increasingly slaves. Paying more of their income to the slave master than the surf ever did.

Increasingly regulated in everything they do, across the road from me as a rancher who cannot cut trees, including dead trees from one of his properties which is up higher in the mountains and surrounded by a national forest, unless he gets a permit. That’s to cut trees on his own property, dead or dying trees. He cannot haul them to his place here to sell them as firewood without a permit. He has to show in his records every sale he makes, so that if I go there and buy a cord of wood, I have to give him the money and take a receipt. He has to make out a receipt.

Now this is a kind of regulation we have and it isn’t as bad as in some states. I know a friend in Virginia who found that he could not cut a branch from a tree that was dead, the branch, or cut down a dead tree without a permit from the county. Is that freedom? This is the kind of thing that is routinely commonplace. It is a form of slavery. So in that respect, we have to say yes the income tax is evil. But the evil lies deeper than the tax protest movement realizes. Karl Marx favor of the tax revolt. He was the great modern exponent of it. His reason for favoring it was because he wanted to disrupt society. He wanted to create a tremendous breakdown in civil government in order to pave the way for revolution, and that’s all the tax movement can do. It can be disruptive and destructive.

It takes a different view of life and essentially a religious perspective to create a new social order and it is this that is lacking in the tax revolt movement. Well I got a little wound up on that subject but it’s one I feel rather strongly about. It is a sad fact that in our times, so very, very many books have been written about slavery, especially since the civil rights movement began. I think I must have picked up a dozen or two of these books. They do contain a great many interesting pieces of information, but what they lack is basically an overall perspective on the subject.

Moreover, an important fact that they overlook is this that slavery unhappily and one or two of them like Milton Meltzer do recognize it although what Meltzer does is simply to comment on this, and drop it as a not too nice an idea as this. Slavery develop as civilization developed. Now it was not necessarily so, we can very definitely say because the Bible certainly lays down the foundation for something very different and what the Bible regards as the necessary order is different. In the Old Testament, while the word slavery is used, it really mean bondservant. No Hebrew could enslave another Hebrew, he could be a bondservant for a period of six years, but then he had to be released on the sabbatical years.

A foreigner who was not a believer could be locked and held as a slave beyond six years. However the foreigner, if he became a believer, had to be freed. And then naturally, under the circumstances, they did become believers. This fact continued through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. That accounts for a very, very large percentage of the people who are called Jews in the modern world in Europe. The theological studies, blood type study, and all have shown that there isn’t any distinction between English Jews in English men, German Jews and Germans, French Jews and French men, they’re physiologically the same.

And the reason is that when much of Europe was still peopled by barbarians, the Jewish settlers and merchants were far advanced culturally. They did acquire slaves. These slaves very quickly were converted. And as a result they were freed. It was extremely rare throughout the Middle Ages for a Jewish slave to be a slave for life, because in most cases, they converted and then they were freed and were members of the Jewish community. But apart from that, in most cultures, slavery provided the technology. The kind of construction work that required many employees. The kind of living that meant living in some luxury and convenience.

The average American has the equivalent today of about three 350 or more slaves. This is why we live so much better than people did let us say 1000 years ago. It was not the advanced of humanitarianism or some special insight that the church developed, that abolished slavery, people had known generation after generation that slavery was evil. Then a few reformers called attention to that. Certainly, all through the centuries, people had the biblical law in what it had to say on the subject before them. But they preferred that kind of living that slavery provided, until the rise of technology made slavery obsolete. And the personal ownership of slavery disappeared. What has replaced it is the state ownership, and the state does not move in terms of efficiency, in terms of productivity, and so it can perpetuate an obsolete system.

Now morally slavery was always obsolete. Technologically, slavery became obsolete in the last century. But obsolescence, inefficiency, corruption, these sorts of things mean nothing to the state. The state is not an agency that moves in terms of these factors. And so you have the revival of slavery by the modern faith. Speaking of the inefficiency and the stupidity of bureaucracies and Civil Government. I like the comment made by a recent writer dealing with the breakdown of our money. He commented on the devastation wrought to money via Washington in recent years.

And then in a passing sentence he said, “We cannot lay the blame on conspiracy within the government, nor to the trilateral or anyone else because to ascribe a conscientious, developed and working conspiracy to them is just to bribe more intelligence to them than they possess. We are dealing in these people with stupidly more than a conspiracy.”

Now, I’d like to turn to something very different. We today have seen a dramatic shift in a generation in our education, in our view of the past and in the man we remember and honor in our past. George Washington is no longer the central figure in our history. In fact, I can only describe the view of Washington I have encountered repeatedly among public school teachers who teach history as phonographic. Their hatred for him is insane and unreasoning. Patrick Henry is virtually gone. We’re not alone in this. And one country after another, the great men of the past they’re being forgotten. History is being rewritten.

What 1984 described is actually taking place and has taken place; doublethink newspeak, the rewriting of history and much, much more. This is why I want to talk for a while now on a book that came out, published in England in 1934, the author was Roger Vercel, the title Bertrand of Britainny. Bertrand of Britainny is largely forgotten today, but he was once one of the very great men of France. Honored over the generation as perhaps the creator and the missionary he had been called of national consciousness. He was very important and that much earlier than Joan of Arc. He laid the foundation for what she later did, and her work was grief and his was the lifetime.

He did off the English threat, came very close to destroying it forever and was in many respects one of the both remarkable men of history. And yet his was a very, very strange history. He was born in 1320. He was born into a noble family, the first born. But he was a monster in appearance. The lady, his mother, a beautiful blonde Norman mother, his father, a Briton found him repulsive to look at. His own mother refused to look at him again for a full three months. When she brought herself to look at her first born again in the care of a wet nurse, she uttered a cry of horror, “He’s a monster.”

She went into hysterics and insisted that it could not be her son, that she could never have brought such an ugly creature into the world. She tried to tell herself that the wet nurse had exchanged one of her own children for her Bertrand. It’s a miracle that he lived. He was despised by his parents, as other children were born, he was pushed further into the background. He was not even allowed to eat at the same table with his father and mother, his brothers and sisters. They found him too repulsive to lookout at. He was allowed to sit in a dark corner and the scraps that were left over from the plate of the rest of the family were brought to him at the end of the meal.

They were hoping he would die. Certainly, they did everything to ensure his death, but he survived. He survived in spite of hearing his mother in hysterics whenever he was too obvious on the scene, scream, “What to God you are dead.” The turning point in his life came when a nun called to visit her mother. This nun was something of an herbalist, she was a converted Jewish, and she saw the animal-like little monster in the corner.

She went up to him to be nice to him and he, used only to beatings and to insults startled at her and ran off. While his mother cried out that it was a waste of time to talk to anyone like that monster and that his father and I wished he were dead and buried. Bertrand heard that, but the nun made a prophecy then and there, something she was not in the habit of doing, that this boy would surpass the fame of all his ancestors, that France would heap honors upon him, that he would be talked of all over Europe and as far as Jerusalem. And she then concluded with intensity, “If all this does not come true, you may have me shamefully burned at the state.

That nun’s conviction shook her mother, so that from that time on, Bertrand was treated indeed as the eldest son. He was if I recall it about 11 at the time. Although something of a monster, he was incredibly strong. Earlier before the nun arrived, it sometimes took three or four servants to hold him down and carry him out when the family did not want him around. To a dying day, the mother could not say a good word for him. But fearful of the nun’s prophesy, she allowed him to be treated as the eldest son so that he was now tolerate at the best.

When she died by the way, his mother left something in her will for all the children except Bertrand. She could never accept the fact that this child had come out of her. And the father was not much better. Well, very early, he began to show his ability. He was given some education but as a semi-prisoner. In fact he was a maturate of the castle from the age of 11 to 16. He was no longer to be treated as someone to leave scrap to and hope he would die but he was no one to parade in public.

Well at this time France was in a fearful state. The old order of Hillary was dead, religious faith was declining. The people were becoming barbarians by choice even as we are today in our city. Where a generation ago the grandparents of the hoodlums today were God fearing and well behaved people. Today their children and grandchildren are moral monsters than hoodlums. That same kind of thing was happening then.

Let me read to you something of the life of the day. This is the year 1361 and Russell comments the names of the details of this chapter belonged to history not to melodrama. We have very extensive documentation. In a fortified castle in Normandy. The whole area now is under periodic control by various forces, at one time the French, another time the English. There is not much difference between the two.

They regard the common people as nothing and they treat them savagely. They wrote about what they did with delight and this is Russell. The monk, his face ravaged with sorrow crosses the busy yard. Seeing him, an archer on duty steps forward bringing his weapon to attention. Last week they plundered a convent, old cop, tapestries and chaste bowls into bundle, drunk from the jewel taluses and carried off heavy all aquaries in more instances of fine gold. They drove the monks into the forest with pikes, ripped open those who lied, but kept this old one to sing mass for them on Sunday. For the company is religious on occasion.

“Friend of God, enemy of the whole world,” says the captain. That city is at [inaudible 00:52:56] in the north tower, the abbess of the neighboring nunnery and a few nuns. Everything is well managed to as the brigands are no great scholars the monk keeps the books. Draws up the balance fee, the weekly gain, writes out to the safe conducts parchments that are worth much worth when the peasants have to pay for them. Then he describes the great deal more, the hour for the daily rate of the nuns.

On the upper floor another door is opened. There is a woman tied to a ring riveted in the wall. This stout peasant woman Margaret the mob cap, who’s from fleshes delightful to take hold up as a mania for running away to join her husband and child hidden in the forest. Twice she has been recaptured, this third time she’ll be put to death. Russell reminds us again that this is all documented.

There were people who could write like this monks and no one among the knights so called, who could read. Behind the next door children are crying, some 10-year-old urchins who had been captured because the captain wanted patties. So that they would apply themselves to the study of fine manners, they were made to line up yesterday around the bread ban. It was opened, one of the little lads was thrust inside with a mad cap, it was closed again. The other stayed there until no more cries could be heard, only caterwaulings until blood running out through the birds they joined the bottom of the chest stained [Inaudible 00:54:59] stone.

Afterwards the ban was opened and they were made to bend over the red [Inaudible 00:55:09] crops, as the bees sprung at their faces, education. As the patrol goes down, here are a few peasants who because they would not pay willingly have had lips or noses that’s cut off. Trapped to their hands are copper parts and riveted to their feet kettles. Thus they cannot move without causing a crutter, an ingenious precaution with considerably simplifies their supervision. Naturally in this situation, the peasants were heading for the forest trying to escape capture and then they were hunted down like this. Those who were captured “Our leaf to the end of tethers that are smeared with blood because there has been a little galloping on the way.” Others are loaded on the horses their feet tightly strapped under the animals’ bellies.

There are also a few willing who are thrown over the saddles, and as they have been molested a little on the way. Their garments are toned and they are almost naked. But now the sound of the cavalcade, there appears on the staircase of honor a lady whose high hair dressed, tucked with lace, crowned with the most skillful [Inaudible 00:56:38] hair that could be admired at the court of Edward III in England. All pink with rouge she trips ups to the noble captain whose expression hardened by contempt remains unchanged.

She is as distinguished wife of the master. He has come from London. She loves the captain as the noble lady Isabel [inaudible 00:57:02] niece of the queen of England loved his Huestache [inaudible 00:57:07] the [inaudible 00:57:07]. The brigand have dismounted as the peasants tied hand and foot are aligned up against the wall and the game begins, a game of massacre.

The good archers have sea stones and are throwing them with precision and in force. The object is to break as many teeth as possible at one throw. They’re counted by turning back the mangle lips. Thumbs are pinned through with small coals. The screams cannot rise above the laughter. Other peasants are thrown head down into the bottom of the suck which is hung on a peg. The joke of the suck is very funny and the lady laughs.

Well there is much, much more of that although when you get to seeing later and encounter Pedro the Cruel you’ll realize how far until 20th century Marxism in humanity could go.

Bertrand took with to forest with a few young men. He organized the peasants. He created them into a fine army that hit the English again and again. His men never molested any of the peasants or their women folk and hence no one ever betrayed them. This was as the boy of 16 that he accomplished this. His fame grew so that he was made marshal of France by the king of France. His one grief was that when he had a formal army, he could not control their depredations as he could his boys and peasants in the forest.

They were more and well behaved as they fought, but not so the army. Again and again he destroyed the English forces. His Spanish campaign was a remarkable success. One thing about Bertrand, he had a beautiful voice so that he spoke, his ugliness seemed to disappear. He married a very beautiful woman who saw his greatness. But he was sometime home only a month or so in three year times because he was continuously on the battle field for France.

He had no children. His wife died in his absence. He married again. He died childless. He was buried with the kings of France at Saint-Denis, where Charlemagne was originally buried. He was a deeply religious man. His dedication to France was so great that when France did not provide the funds for financing his army he stripped himself of his wealth. Went to his wife and begged for and took her jewels and pawn them so that he might be able to furnish an army.

He was a very great man. One of the great men of European history, but Bertrand of Brittany is now forgotten. We rewrite history and what Bertrand represented the sense of honor, the faith and all are today no longer respected. Moreover, Bertrand is the antithesis of modern thinking because he should have been warped mentally as he was physically, but he was not.

And today we expect them to be warped, but Bertrand the man of tremendous moral and physical strength. A man of incredible gentleness in an age of barbarism and savagery, self-created barbarism because men were departing from the faith. Stands out as a witness to what someone who had the most incredibly evil treatment as a child from his own parent could still become.

Well our time has worthily ended. I’ve enjoyed this again. I like to share these things with you and I hope you too have enjoyed what I’ve had to say. And that sometime you look up Russell’s book Bertrand of Brittany in a library. Perhaps there are still a few copies that have been left on the shelves. Good folks like this tend to be destroyed and you’ll enjoy reading about that man. Thank you and goodbye.